URL Simplification Trick Help

[AdamGHA]

Hi ,

Basically, I'm working on a project with member pages that I want to simplify. I'm really stumped and my friend who's doing the programming is clueless. Right now pages are located at...

http://www.xyz.com/members/member_name

(the members 'directory' is actually members.php--I have a forcetype set up)

To make things simpler for users, I'd like them to be able to type:

http://www.xyz.com/member_name

and for it to redirect to their page.

Is there any way to edit the server/domain's information so that if someone types

http://www.xyz.com/unknown_directory

it automatically forwards to

http://www.xyz.com/members/member_name?

Like if someone types:

http://www.xyz.com/adam

-- the server sees that there's no directory named adam so it automatically forwards that person to:

http://www.xyz.com/members/adam

That would solve the problem. I'm just not sure if this is possible. I'd be infinitely grateful if someone could help (and I'm sure every member would be grateful too!)

Thanks so much!

-Adam Ghahramani

 

[danielhozac]

You could create a 404 page written in PHP which checks if a user by the name exists. Something like:
[tt]<?php
$username = basename($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
/* check if a user by $username exists... */
if (exists($username))
header('Location: /members/' . $username);
else
echo &quot;Page not found.&quot;;
?>[/tt]
If the above file is saved as error.php, you would have to add
[tt]ErrorDocument 404 /error.php[/tt]
to your [tt]httpd.conf[/tt].

//Daniel